Wait, Is This Article About Gender Equality at Harvard Business School Saying You Can't Be Accomplished and Dateable at the Same Time?

Via The New York Times, the class that graduated from Harvard Business School this May did so as the first guinea pigs of a two-year experiment to give HBS a gender makeover closing the gap between male and female success. In the past, women entered the school with the same test scores and grades as men but quickly fell behind.

Under Harvard’s first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, newly appointed dean Nitin Nohria enacted a plan to make big improvements in gender relations. Among the changes, the school held class participation workshops, new grading software tools to check gender patterns, and introduced a new course grouping students into problem-solving teams. The results were significant.

The successes: Women’s grades rose, and the gap between men and women’s grades fell dramatically, and overall student satisfaction ratings were higher than they had been for years. Female professors’ student approval scores skyrocketed. And female students made up 40 percent of the school’s Baker scholars, the top five percent of the class.

The continuing issue: The problems with gender equity reach far beyond business school. Or, as HBS administrator Frances Frei said, ““We made progress on the first-level things, but what it’s permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is.” When graduating women enter the real business world, they aren’t likely to see the same level of gender sensitivity. Instead, most will find less opportunities and lower-paying jobs than their male counterparts.

And one possible cause of gender inequality that could persist beyond business school and into the real world is the romance factor. It seems that women at HBS, especially single women, feel torn between academic and social success. Through years of observation, the administration and faculty agreed that female students grades were suffering from a lack of classroom participation. But why? Possibly, a desire to maintain their social status. Whereas men who tended to have the top social status at HBS were wealthy finance guys, women’s “social capitalization” was more likely to be based on, surprise, their looks rather than their professional success. One female student feared that seeming too ambitious would hinder her dating life, based on comments from guy friends like, ““She’s kind of hot, but she’s so assertive.”

And while that may seem outdated, it’s still a problem that unfortunately, doesn't exist only among the exclusive (and proud of it) Harvard students seeking to date other Harvard types while they can. Consider the recent study that found that men suffer self-esteem problems when their significant other succeeds. A woman who seeks to be professionally accomplished and to find a romantic partner, as most of us do, may find those desires to be at odds.

In order to combat this issue, HBS attempted to encourage its students to focus more on academics and less on alcohol-fused socialization, giving them additional work, cracking down on problems with drinking, and even prohibiting Halloween costumes in classrooms. Despite student resentment at the intrusion on their social lives, the environment for women did improve.

The results of the gender equality experiment at Harvard were encouraging, yes. But it would be even more encouraging if at school and beyond, women didn't have to feel as though their romantic desirability was indirectly correlated with their professional success and ambition.

What do you think about Harvard's experiment and the results? Have you ever felt pressure to choose between your academic status and social status?

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Gena KaufmanRelationships writer. Lawyer turned writer who believes that when your love life hands you lemons, you should quit your job, move home, and share your dating mishaps on the Internet.